


Back to Start

by AshOfSix



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Canon Divergence - The Born-Again Identity, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 05:26:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshOfSix/pseuds/AshOfSix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean’s world was falling apart around him.  He had failed so many people in the last few months alone.  All of his friends and family were dead, and it was his fault.  He had failed to save them.  With both his conscious and unconscious worlds filled with grief and pain, Dean Winchester never expects to wake up in his mother’s arms or with the burden of <i>having to experience it all again.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Back to Start

Dean’s world was falling apart around him.

First Cas—

Then he broke down Sammy’s wall.

And the leviathan walked him into that damn lake.

Then, Bobby—

And now Sam… Sammy needs help.

Dean looked into a faith healer in Colorado, and… _He looks like Cas!_ But he can’t be. Dean _saw_ him. Dean _saw_ the leviathan behind… all of Cas, his movements his eyes, his-- Cas couldn’t be alive. _But the faith healer!_

But Emmanuel wasn’t Cas. He looked like him, sure, but it’s not that that meant much in this line of work. And he had mojo like Cas. But that didn’t make him Cas. And that didn’t mean this not-Cas couldn’t at least try to fix Sammy.

But there were demons waiting for them when they got back to the hospital.

Meg told Emmanuel that he was Cas and they sent him off to clear the way, but…

Cas, Emmanuel, whoever it was that wore Jimmy Novak’s skin and wielded Casteil’s powers, approached the demons and smote one after another, but he was not fast enough to slay them all.

One of the demons got lucky and got a wicked knife into Cas/Emmanuel’s back, dragged it up, and twisted sharply.

  


  


That blade shouldn’t have been able to kill an angel.

Dean got that bastard, and the blade that—

That blade wasn’t anything special.

It couldn’t have even killed a demon.

But Castiel—

  


Meg ran off. There was nothing keeping her here anymore. She had no bargaining chips, no protection, so Dean was by himself as he burst into the hospital in search of his baby brother.

But he was too late there, too.

Sammy wasn’t in the ward.

None of the hospital staff could give Dean any indication of where Sam was, and it took entirely too long to find him dead, electrocuted to death near the battered body of an orderly whose co-workers swore he was “the picture of perfect health when he came in earlier today” in a room that smelled of sulfur.

  


Dean didn’t know what to do. The world slowed down around him. He fell to his knees.

Screaming. 

Screaming.

Crying himself hoarse.

Lashing out

He hardly noticed as someone shoved a needle into his arm and forced a tranquilizer into his bloodstream.

The world went fuzzy, then black, around him.

And one thought echoed throughout Dean’s mind:

_This was all his fault._

  


\--

  


_He had failed them all._

Sam.

Cas.

Bobby.

Lisa.

Ben

Ellen.

Jo.

Dad.

Some of them more than once, and so many more that he could no longer name them all.

  


Dean spent days, weeks, months, in the hospital fading in and out of consciousness.

His dreams were filled with the deaths of all the people he had failed to protect.

And in his short, infrequent periods of wakefulness, he screamed and cried until his throat was raw or an orderly came in to pump more drugs into his system.

  


That was Dean’s existence for the longest time.

  


  


Then suddenly, something changed.

Something in the air was different.

  


Dean woke screaming and crying as usual.

But something wasn’t right.

  


Dean couldn’t know that the screams that accompanied his sudden wakefulness would wake the other three inhabitants of this house.

He didn’t know that his screams would wake the infant in the next room.

He couldn’t know that the man who sold his soul for Dean’s life would be the one to rush to tend to the crying infant.

He never could have imagined that his long-dead mother would charge into his room, scoop him up into her arms, and rub her hands in soothing circles on his back as she murmured comforting sounds into his hair.

  


\--

  


Dean struggled, flailed in the arms of the woman who had wrapped herself around him, but she only held him closer. Dean could hardly hear her soft vocalizations, but something about her proximity—her smell, the feeling of safeness in her arms—eventually lulled him back to sleep.

Mary Winchester carried her four-year-old son to her room and was soon joined by her husband.

It was the first night in a long while that Dean’s sleep was plagued by normal monsters rather than by demons he had conjured.

**Author's Note:**

> I started this because I couldn't find enough time travel/redo/"fix-it" fics. (I would appreciate any links you can give me!) However, I'm not much of a writer, and I haven't really written anything other than school-related essays for the past couple years much less SPN-fanfic.  
> I would love to complete this, but I don't yet have any concrete ideas about the plot I'd like this to follow, and I don't really know when I'm actually going to have time to write.  
> I think this can kind of stand on its own for now, and if I try to continue without having a plot and outline, this will probably end up simply being incomplete or being incredibly bad in its aimlessness.  
> Any feedback you could give would be lovely. It could also help in trying to decide what kind of form and structure this fic could potentially take.  
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
